human beings all pledged to the destruction of our society and acting in complete discipline under a few leaders superhumanly wise! The thing is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity for acting in this fashion. They are far too limited, far too diverse.
Moreover, the motive is completely lacking. Why merely destroy and why, if your object is merely to destroy, manifest such wide differences in your aims? One may say justly that there is always a tendency to reaction against alien surroundings, and in so far as that reaction is intense and effective it is destructive of those surroundings. One may point out that such reaction in the case of the Jews, as in the case of all other alien bodies, is in the main unconscious and instinctive. All that is true enough; but the conception of a vast age-long plot, culminating in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold water, any more than will the corresponding hallucination which led men to believe that the French revolution (a thing utterly different in kind from the Russian) was the mere outward expression of a strictly disciplined secret body. In the case of the French Revolution everything was put down (by the forerunners of to-day's Anti-Semitic enthusiasts) to the secret agency of The Order of Templars acting unweariedly through six centuries, and finally bringing down the French monarchy. In the case, of course, of the Bolshevist anarchy a still longer range is given to the final result: for "Templars" read "Jews," and for "600" read "2,000" years. It is all smoke.
More serious is the statement that this combination of Jews for the destruction of the old Russian society was an act of racial revenge. There is a great element of truth in that. There is no doubt that the greater part of the Jews who took over power in the Russian cities four years ago felt an appetite for revenge against the old Russian State comparable to that felt by any oppressed people against their oppressors. Probably it was more intense even than any other example that could be quoted. We are all witnesses to the way in which the Russian people, religion, and government, and particularly the person and office of the Emperor—were